Great Short Works Of Edgar Allan Poe-INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

G. R. THOMPSON

Despite his desire to be remembered as a poet, it is, to use the words of a recent critic, as the arch-priest of the Gothic horror tale that we remember Edgar Allan Poe. Yet according to the temper of modern criticism generally, there are at least two major problems with Poe’s short stories to prevent us from regarding him so.

First, his Gothic tales seem never quite to work; something is always out of keeping even in the best of them. Allen Tate, in an essay written for the centennial of Poe’s death in 1949, catches the curious effect that Poe has on many insightful readers. On the one hand, Tate “confesses” that Poe’s tales have “massive impact” and that “Poe’s voice” is often “so near that I recoil a little lest he, Montressor, lead me into the cellar, address me as Fortunato, and wall me up alive.” On the other hand, Tate observes that if we do feel Poe’s power, we likely also feel a little guilty about our response, or at least feel oddly disappointed with Poe’s oddly flawed tales, with their apparently overdone rhetoric, melodramatic situations, sudden shifts in tone, and seemingly inappropriate intrusions of the comic and absurd. “‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” Tate writes, “was a little spoiled for me even at fourteen by the interjection of the ‘Mad Tryst of Sir Launcelot Canning’.”

The second major problem with Poe’s tales (actually another aspect of the first) is that as a single group they seem to lack consistency and wholeness; the body of his fiction splits disturbingly into two large, seemingly incon sistent, groups: flawed Gothic tales on the one hand, and flawed comic and satiric tales on the other. Poe’s critics have found this duality disturbing not only because the humor of his comic stories seems unpleasantly morbid, really humorless, or finally pointless, but also because Poe has always seemed to them to be, first and last, a Gothic-Romantic writer. His many attempts at humor and satire, according to the Gothicist view of Poe, show not that he was a humorist, but only that humor was actually “alien” to his personality; when he tried to write humor, he was attempting to put on an incongruous mask out of keeping with his real self.

Indeed, it has come to be conventional to explain the curious incongruities in Poe’s works by means of a psuedo-Freudian biographical approach, as proceeding from his lack of self-identity (Poe as the orphaned child of itinerant actors reared in the home of a tyrannical and unloving foster father). This lack of identity is supposed to have caused him to assume various unsuitable masks or guises and to spend his life in “role-playing.” In this mode, one of the most coherent views of the diversity of Poe’s career is the suggestion that Poe borrowed not only the literary symbols of English Romanticism, but also the very personalities of the English Romantic poets. Poe is supposed to have played Byron in his earliest poems, then Shelley, then Coleridge in his later poems. His “unattractive” satire and parody, according to this view, shows, in another dimension, how much he depended on imitation for literary inspiration. This imitative habit is supposed also to be part of Poe’s “American” quality, derived from the “empirical” habit of mind in the American culture at large. This “empirical” strain in Poe is said to have completely taken over from the “Romantic” one in the early 1840s, when he wrote his first purely “ratiocinative” detective stories. His 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, in which he dis cussed the principle of complete unity and totality of effect, thus shows Poe systematizing a formula for the short story; and “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), in which Poe explained in almost mechanical terms how he came to write “The Raven” step by rational step, shows Poe claiming as his own the analytic mind of M. Dupin, the rational French detective-hero of “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). The scheme falters a little at this point, however, for at the same time that Poe was playing, in the words of Leon Howard, the “coldly calculating emotional engineer” of “The Philosophy of Composition,” he was also playing the bereaved Romantic hero of “The Raven” (1845), a role picked up shortly again in “Ulalume” (1847). Thus, we return to the easy Freudian view of Poe’s inconsistencies: the “personal implications” of “The Raven” as poem along with the prose account of its composition, according to Howard, are “almost” schizophrenic. Howard does go on to say, however, that Poe’s was not truly a “psychological” case, since even before 1846, in the Dupin stories, he was seeking a middle ground intellectually that is most clearly seen in the long philosophical essay Eureka (1848). Dupin is the man of reason and intuition, poet and mathematician, whose imagination provides a hypothesis, whose reason controls its application, and whose observation verifies it. This, Poe proposes in Eureka, is the true way to knowledge: instead of the creeping and crawling methods of induction and deduction, we must have leaps of intuition “corrected” by reason.

But this view of Poe’s imaginative life, attractive and coherent though it may be, does not adequately account for the analytic criticism he practiced from the beginning, nor for the number of satiric and comic works that appeared throughout his twenty-year career in a pattern of loose alternation with the Gothic works. Poe’s first published story, “Metzengerstein,” is ostensibly a Gothic tale; but it was one of a group of five that Poe sent to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier in 1831, four of which (“The Duc de L’Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,” “Loss of Breath,” and “Bon-Bon”) are comic and satiric. These tales, published after “Metzengerstein” early in 1832, were followed in the next three years by four Gothic stories (“MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Assignation,” “Berenice,” and “Morella”). Then came three comic and satiric tales (“Lionizing,” “Hans Phaal,” and “King Pest”) in the middle of 1835, followed by the Gothic tale, “Shadow.” Then two more comic and satiric tales (“Four Beasts in One” in 1836 and “Mystificàtion” in 1837) were followed by two more Gothic tales (“Silence” in 1837 and “Ligeia” in 1838). From the winter of 1838-39 to the winter of 1839-40, we find four satiric tales (“How to Write a Blackwood Article. A Predicament,” “The Devil in the Belfry,” and “The Man That Was Used Up”) followed by three Gothic tales (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”), followed in turn by another comic tale (“Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling”). This loose pattern of alternation continues to the end of Poe’s career, even suggesting conscious self-parody. The Dupin stories (1841-45) are burlesqued in the comic detective story “‘Thou Art the Man’” (1844); the suspended animation of “M. Valdemar” (1845) is made comic in Count Allamistakeo’s resurrection in “Some Words With a Mummy” in the same year; the living burials of Madeline Usher and of Berenice are travestied in “The Premature Burial” (1844); the Gothic decor of “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) and the revenge theme in “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) become part of an absurd, though savage, fairy tale in “Hop-Frog” (1848).

When, at almost exactly the midpoint of his career, Poe first collected his stories as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), the comic and satiric works outnumbered the ostensibly serious works by fourteen to eleven. Of the tales written after 1840, the serious outnumbered the comic and satiric by twenty-four to nineteen (though what is serious and what is comic in about a half dozen of these later tales may, initially, seem arguable). Thus, of the total of Poe’s sixty-eight short tales, thirty-five are serious and thirty-three comic and satiric—a balancing off of the serious and the comic that can hardly be mere accident.

Another, more comprehensive explanation of these and other seeming “inconsistencies” in Poe’s work focuses on the basic thesis of Eureka (1848), Poe’s essay on the origin, meaning, and destiny of the Universe. In this book-length work, Poe begins with the proposition that existence implies ultimate annihilation—not only of the individual, but of all things, in a pointlessly pulsating cosmos which endlessly creates and destroys itself. Often self-consciously facing extinction, the forlorn Poe hero gives way to “hysterical” laughter. In Poe, writes Harry Levin, “the premise of knowledge” is that “all men are mortal, and the insights of tragedy culminate in the posture of dying. More than once…[Poe] reminds us that Tertullian’s credo, ‘I believe because it is absurd,’ was inspired by the doctrine of resurrection. And though Poe’s resurrections prove ineffectual or woefully incomplete, we are reminded by the Existentialists that the basis of man’s plight is absurdity.” Given Levin’s existentialist context, Poe’s Gothic works, implicitly based on a vision of absurdity, and the mad and half-mad Gothic figures which inhabit these works, seem clearly related to the fierce absurdity of his comic and satiric works.

Although this is a progressive explanation (except for the element of “hysteria”) of the whole body of Poe’s work and of its fascination for the modern reader, and while it points the way to a more just assessment of Poe, critics have been slow to re-examine thoroughly the corpus of Poe’s work. The result has been an incomplete revaluation which has passively reinforced the older and now traditional view of Poe as merely the schizophrenic genius of the demoniac imagination. The apparent discrepancy between Poe’s “unnatural” comic face and his “true” serious face remains a nagging problem for the modern reader. Moreover, even the reader who would allow Poe a natural diversity of interest finds himself faced with the problem of just how to read the works of a Gothic humorist—or the works, for that matter, of a humorous Gothicist.

What we need is a new way of reading Poe, a way just as informed as the new readings of Mark Twain and Herman Melville which in the last few decades have saved their works from consignment to the adolescent’s bookshelf. We must divorce ourselves from the traditional Gothicist view of Poe, a view which includes not only the image of Poe as the mad genius of the macabre tale but also the contrary image of Poe as the dreamy poet of the “ideal” world of supernal Beauty. The “ideal” and the “demonic” are, of course, major elements in Poe’s consciously developed image, but so too are the comic and satiric. The real questions are: how to develop a reading inclusive of these divergent tendencies, and how truly divergent are they, at last?

The key to this new style of reading Poe is to be found in the twentieth-century emphasis on the concepts of tension and irony characteristic of the “New Critics”—Brooks, Warren, Empson, Richards, Tate, and others. The contrast between the ideal and the demonic in Poe’s works, between the serious and the comic, the Gothic and the satiric, and, thematically, between hope and despair, is a matter of the balance achieved by the dynamic tension of opposite forces. Flat statements or commitments in Poe are only seeming. Almost everything that Poe wrote is qualified by, indeed controlled by, a prevailing irony in which the artist presents us with slyly insinuated mockery of both ourselves as readers and himself as writer. The view of art (and life) informing both the tales and the poems, and to an extent the criticism, is that of skeptical dissembler and hoaxer, who complexly, ambivalently, and ironically explored the fads of the Romantic Age. All of Poe’s fiction, and the poems as well, can be seen as one coherent piece—as the work of one of the greatest ironists of world literature.

In general, the word irony, historically and at present, points to some basic discrepancy between what is expected or apparent and what is actually the case. As a literary term, irony implies some deception, which becomes clear with the perception of discrepancy between the immediately apparent intention, or meaning, or circumstance, or stated belief, and a half-hidden meaning or reality. Literary irony is seen in a writer’s verbal and structural mode of purporting to take seriously what he does not take seriously, or at least does not take with complete seriousness. In the implied contrasts the ironist sets up, there is often a sense of one term in some way mocking the other. Irony may also be a serious, non-comic, non-satiric attitude; in such a case irony may mean simply that an expressed attitude is somehow qualified, usually by its opposite possibility. In any event, although there are different ironic tones, irony is more often than not philosophically characterized by a “skepticism” engendered by seeing opposite possibilities in a situation, as is especially evident in the particularly complex, ambivalent and paradoxical skepticism of the strongly ironic poetry of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. This style of irony is highly praised in modern literary criticism; and it is in this sense that the term irony describes Poe’s characteristic mode of writing, his habit of mind, and even his style of Romantic idealism.

But Poe is not only an ironist, he is a satiric ironist. Satire, in general, makes fuller use of comic distortion than irony and is always immediately clearer, since the incongruities show more plainly. Satire distorts the characteristic features of an individual, or of a society, or of an artistic work in order to ridicule that which the satirist dislikes—usually (or avowedly) the vices and follies of mankind, the lamentable falling away from traditional ideals. When the satirist makes use of irony, he pretends to take his opponents seriously, accepting their premises and values and methods of reasoning in order eventually to expose their absurdity. The relationship of irony to satire, however, is complicated by the problem of emphasis, since either can be the weapon of the other, since either can provide the basic thrust of a work, and since both make use of distortion. But in addition to Poe’s ironic and satiric styles, we must consider his closely related style as a hoaxer. Whereas satire makes use of comic surprises and contrasts, irony is usually subtler, and the essential deception involved in literary irony may be so subtle that the work becomes a hoax, and this is often the case in Poe. A hoax is usually thought of as an attempt to deceive others about the truth or reality of an event. But a literary hoax attempts to persuade the reader not merely of the reality of false events but of the reality of false literary intentions or circumstances—that a work is by a certain writer or of a certain age when it is not, or that one is writing a serious Gothic story when one is not. The laugh of the hoaxer is rather private, intended at best for a limited coterie. Just as the satirist limits his circle of understanding readers to those who can perceive the flaws of society, so the ironist limits his circle of understanding readers to those who can discriminate with more subtlety the complexities of art and life. At the extreme, the hoax can limit the circle of understanding readers to an audience of one. In such a case it can be seen as a kind of supreme irony in which the writer mocks even perceptive eirons like himself, and even, therefore, himself. Indeed, the German “Romantic Ironists” of the early nineteenth century, who had great influence on Poe, constructed theories of transcendence of one’s mere “selfness” through almost this very means—what Friedrich Schlegel called “self-parody” and “transcendental buffoonery,” which involves achieving a mystical sense of an “ideal” state beyond our limited earthly one by playing, as it were, a cosmic hoax on both the world and oneself.

It has been insufficiently recognized that it is this Continental movement or school that comprised Poe’s basic intellectual, philosophical, and artistic milieu. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth, writers like Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, J. M. R. Lenz, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, and others had preceded Poe in the exploration of the twin mysteries of the psychological and occult—in the exploration of what they called the “night-side” of the mind and Nature. By Poe’s time Romanticists generally had come to feel that the secrets of Nature lay deep within the human mind itself. But in their philosophical struggles with objectivity and subjectivity, and in their exploration of mental aberrations, many, especially the “gloomy Germans,” became increasingly pessimistic about man’s ability to free himself from the web of illusion that existence seemed to present. However, the small group of writers and thinkers we are concerned with developed a liberating if still rather gloomy theory of the darkly comic along with a philosophy of “Transcendental Irony,” or more familiarly “Romantic Irony,” which could, they felt, free the deep-thinking man from his agonies (at least temporarily). Mod ern critics look at historical “Romantic Irony” as an awkward and seemingly pointless breaking of dramatic illusion, such as having a stage “audience” interrupt a play with criticisms and even usurp the roles of the “actors,” or having a character in a novel observe in Volume III that the lake he is now passing by is the very one he had fallen into the Volume I, page such and such. These techniques, of course, have been used frequently by twentieth-century expressionist playwrights—indeed, they seem to have been in some sense rediscovered by the practitioners of Theater of the Absurd in their attempt to present an empty, absurd, illusory world. In Poe’s time, this kind of “irony” became (for Poe and the coterie of writers we are talking about) the highest creative, poetic, and philosophical activity, having as its aim the “annihilation” of apparent contradictions and earthly limitations through a liberating perception of the element of Absurdity in the mysterious contrarieties of the Universe. The Romantic Ironist strove, in his contrariness, deceptiveness, satire, and even self-mockery, to attain a penetrating view of existence from a subliminally Idealistic height—but always with an eye on the terrors of an ultimately incomprehensible, disconnected, absurd, or at best probably decaying and possibly malevolent Universe. The more usual Romanticist wished to penetrate beyond the sensory to the ultimate secrets that, as mentioned, Romantic writers increasingly felt lay within the mind itself. But for the “Dark Romanticist,” especially for the Romantic Ironist, the only attainable harmony in all the deceptiveness and chaos which the world presented was a double vision, a double awareness, a double emotion, culminating in an ambivalent joy of stoical self-possession and intellectual control. This kind of Romantic artist-hero held the world together by the force of his own mind—or he watched the “world” and his own mind crumble under the stress of dark contrary forces. The result, in the works of these writers, is an ambivalent pessimism: a kind of black humor, or black irony, and also a skepticism engendered by the self-awareness of the subjective human mind insistently reaching out toward an illusive certainty.

The fiction and poetry resulting from such philosophical and artistic attitudes were sometimes called grotesques, sometimes arabesques, by the German (and French) writers of the day. These two words have complicated and intertwining histories; but clearly Poe was pointing out his philosophical and literary affinities with these writers when he remarked, albeit negatively, on the apparent “Germanism” of his tales in the Preface to his first collection of fiction, significantly titled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). This distinctively German genre of Romantic fiction (and poetry) is characterized by multiplicity of view and yet also by complete dramatization of the imagined world from the viewpoint of a single mind. Thus, in Poe’s works, the limited perspective of the ever-present “I” in the tales has, carefully worked up around it, an intricate “arabesque” structure of illusion, misperception, perversity, and grotesque self-torment. Yet, in the complex structure and tone of the tales and poems, all is treated with a seldom recognized half-humorous ironic detachment from the plight of the “I” protagonist. This is true for both the apparently serious works and the comic and satiric works, though of course in the comic works the ironic and satiric distortions, or grotesqueries, are even clearer. Less clear is the presence of these ironic, mocking, comic elements in the poems, and it will be well to glance at the ironic patterns of some of Poe’s supposedly dream-haunted and intensely Romantic poems before dealing more specifically with any of the Gothic tales.

III

Poe began his literary career as a poet when, at the age of eighteen, he published the small volume, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). Before his first work of fiction was published, he had published two more volumes (or augmented editions) of poems: Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829) and, more simply, Poems (1831). He was not to collect his poetry again, however, for another fifteen years, when he published The Raven and Other Poems (1845). In his Preface to this volume he claimed that, had he not been forced by worldly considerations to devote his energies to the (somewhat) more profitable pursuits of editing, criticism, and tale-writing, poetry would have been his first choice for a career.

Although the 1845 volume included such works as “The Coliseum,” “Israfel,” “The City in the Sea,” “Sonnet—Silence,” “Sonnet—To Science,” and “To Helen,” Poe yet remarked, perhaps in ironic self-defense, that the volume contained nothing “of much value to the public or very creditable to myself.” This seemingly modest remark is not at all characteristic of Poe, but the Preface concludes more typically with the observation that “with me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not—they cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.” Thus his prefatory deprecation of his efforts in poetry is actually an exaltation of the Poetic Ideal, which he elsewhere suggested was a vision of “Supernal Beauty,” an ideal above the mundane considerations of deadlines and commerce.

This image of himself is in accord with Baudelaire’s conception of Poe. Yet it is probable that Poe actually did feel that his achievement in poetry did not match his achievements in editing, criticism, and fiction. Certainly, modern critical interest in his fiction tends to bear out this judgment, though the present age is perhaps congenitally unsympathetic to the Romantic ideal of rendering a visionary world “out of space—out of time,” as Poe puts it in “Dream-Land” (1844). But many of his best-known poems do not so seek after the Transcendental Ideal, but instead present, as in his fiction, dramatically rendered (though extreme) psychological states. “The Raven” is a case in point; indeed, the poem became the test case for his critical theories of absolute craftsmanship and classical control over the recalcitrant materials of the visionary—the discipline of the poeta (maker, craftsman) shaping, modifying, controlling the wild visions of the vates (seer, prophet). In “The Raven,” the most occult and Gothic materials are fully rendered as the dramatization of the extreme psychological state of the bereaved lover who absolutely revels in self-torment. And in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), Poe is at pains to point out the fact that the eerie appropriateness of the raven’s one-word refrain, rather than a message from Beyond, is but the learned response of a dumb animal, and that the significance of the reply is totally the product of the brain of the distraught student. Such a precise dramatic and thematic conception of the psychological state of the bereaved lover is hardly that of the dream-bedazzled Romantic seer that readers have usually taken Poe the poet to be.

It must be admitted that in “The Raven” intense “passions” are indeed “reverenced,” in their way, and that there is a distinct difference in imagery between the early “dream” poems before 1840 and the rather more dramatically conceived poems afterwards. But even such a poem as the early “Sonnet—To Science” (1829), which first stood as an introduction to “Al Aaraaf” (Poe’s dream-vision of the far wandering star where poetic myths, banished from earthly realities, still have ethereal existence) is actually a very tough-minded work when looked at closely. “Sonnet—To Science” seems, on the surface, to lament the death of poetic vision at the hands of modern physics, chemistry, and astronomy; but insinuated into its surface pattern is an undercurrent of ironic meaning. The first lines, “Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! /Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes,” hint that since Science with its “dull realities” is but the daughter of Time itself, all things are mutable. It is not just that the scientific vision changes our conception of things: the very order of existence itself is mutable and capable of diverse conceptualizations of its form. This is why Science is the “true” daughter of Time. Then, with thematic wryness, Poe recreates in the last lines of the poem the older “poetic” or “imaginative” vision of the forces of the Universe in terms of hamadryads, naiads, and moon-goddesses, despite the current unvisionary, scientific explanations which the first part of the poem says have “preyed” upon the poetic sensibilities. The culminating irony, never sufficiently remarked by Poe’s critics, lies in the consistency of feminine images employed throughout. To move from the unlovely but true “daughter” of Time who alters our perception of things to the lament for the lost poetic vision of nymphs and goddesses is finally to suggest that Science is, for its time in fashion, but another construct of the mind—less appealing than the old myths, but a “nymph” of the imagination nevertheless. Amid the beautifully melancholy recreation of the lost “summer dream beneath the tamarind tree,” we find the ironic, subtle, and dramatically presented confrontation of the “I” narrator with total illusoriness, even with nothingness and void, as he muses on the “mythic” in poetry and science both.

This tough-minded complexity in Poe’s melancholy Romantic dream-poems has yet another side—the satiric. The poem that stood as the “Introduction” (also extant in shortened versions and called “Preface” and “Romance”) to Poe’s third volume of poetry (1831) exhibits the same kind of complexity and ironic self-knowledge as “Sonnet—To Science.” Its first and last verses (as the poem usually is given in its shorter version) seem sentimental and self-pitying: “eternal Condor years” fall upon the visionary soul of the poet-narrator, robbing him of his ability to see the benign aspects of the world of spirit; even the few calm hours he occasionally has must be spent in passionate response to some dimly perceived horror lurking beneath. Paradoxically, this “celebration” of passion, of emotion, suggests that even horror or sorrow is better than “nothing” at all. The visionary perception of, first, childhood’s natural predilection for the green-plumed parrot of Romance (no insignificant choice of bird), and second, the grown man’s apprehension of dark “tumult” and “unquiet” in Nature, is better than what is hinted at in “The Raven,” “Sonnet—Silence,” “Sonnet—To Science,” and other of the poems—Nothingness. There must be something beyond the illusory world, the poem seems to say; let it be perceived, even though it be demoniacally horrible. But the long middle section of “Introduction” presents a wry and ironically toned rendering of the “perversity” of the “visionary” spirit. This ironic portrait comes suspiciously close to self-mockery, and at the very least contains gentle mockery of all visionary Romantic spirits. After commenting that in the newly perceived “blackness of the general Heaven” there is at least in “the very blackness” yet “Light on the lightning’s silver wing,” the narrator further remarks (in eighteenth-century couplet style):

For, being an idle boy lang syne,

Who read Anacreon, and drank wine,

I early found Anacreon rhymes

Were almost passionate sometimes—

And by strange alchemy of brain

His pleasures always turned to pain….

And so being young, and dipt in folly,

I fell in love with melancholy….

It is, indeed, sometimes argued that because Poe was only eighteen when his first volume appeared, that it is not likely he intended any ironic serio-comic complexity. The test, of course, is the poetry itself. What, for example, are we to make of the poem “Fairy-Land,” which appeared with “Sonnet—To Science” as early as 1829 when Poe was but twenty? This poem is either one of the worst Poe ever produced—or a spoof. We cannot tell for sure at the beginning whether the poem is serious or comic, for Poe’s indefinite landscapes elsewhere are not unlike the

Dim vales—and shadowy floods—

And cloudy-looking woods,

Whose forms we can’t discover

For the tears that drip all over.

But the awkward incantation of the waxing and waning of “huge moons” in this visionary landscape in the memorable line “Again—again—again—” can hardly be serious. When, a few lines later, the narrator is speaking of a moon “more filmy than the rest” and adds as a parenthetical aside “(A kind which, upon trial,/They have found to be the best),” the “they” referred to can hardly be other than Romantic poets in general. Thus the “forms” of vales and floods and woods that “we can’t discover” in the first lines refers to the style of the Romantic poets, with their sentimental “tears that drip all over” obscuring everything. Again, another memorable incantation follows: this moon “comes down—still down—and down.” And later the narrator comments: “And then, how deep! —O deep” is the “passion” of the “drowsy” spirits of this fairy-land. When the spirits of the place rise, and their “moony covering” flies off into the skies, our narrator reaches intently for an appropriate Romantic metaphor (a satiric thrust at a line in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh): “Like—almost anything—/Or a yellow Albatross.” The poetic spirits now “use that moon no more/ For the same end as before,” that is, as “a tent,” an image and metaphor which, the narrator remarks, “I think extravagant.” Subtly echoing Shelley’s famous phrase “the desire of the moth for the star,” Poe’s narrator concludes by describing the “butterflies of Earth, who seek the skies” and bring down a “specimen” of Romance and moon and extravagant metaphor upon “their quivering wings,” an example of which, we may assume, is the present poem. This parody of the Romanticist stance has for years been taken with a straight face by readers who have not caught Poe’s complex sense of wit and irony, and who insist on hanging on to the sentimental picture of Poe as the youthful visionary dream-poet (who, alas, died so young).

But even Poe’s earliest poem (indeed, his earliest-known work) was blatantly comic and satiric. Written just a year before the Byronic and seemingly self-indulgent emotionalism of Tamerlane (1827), this poem, “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” (1826), was a satirical sally in forty-six heroic couplets aimed at a dry goods clerk named Pitts, who was unsuccessfully wooing a Richmond, Virginia, belle. After an opening lament for the deterioration of the manners of the times, the speaker of the poem comically articulates what might indeed be the persistent philosophical and artistic question of Poe’s entire career. Should one’s philosophical stance (here engendered by the pitiable condition of the poor rejected Pitts) be that of Heraclitus or Democritus? The speaker of the poem wonders:

I’ve been a thinking—isn’t that the phrase?—

I like your Yankee words and Yankee ways—

I’ve been a thinking, whether it were best

To take things seriously, or all in jest….

Such may not be the “visionary” and ethereal poetry of “To Helen” or of “Israfel” (a poem which, however, has its sly ironic innuendo about the “bolder note” that could swell from the sky were the speaker of the poem in Israfel’s place). But this other side of Poe—the comic, the ironic, the hoaxical—cannot be ignored, even in the poems. It may be that in the poems Poe presented us with his most intense feelings of loss and illusoriness, but given the possibility of ironic “self-transcendence,” it would be well for the serious reader to look carefully at anything that seems a little too extravagant, or too visionary, or too intense in the poems. “Spirits of the Dead,” “Evening Star,” “A Dream within a Dream,” “In Youth Have I Known,” “The Happiest Day,” “The Lake,” “Ulalume,” “The Bells,” “Eldorado,” “For Annie,” as well as other poems, are not without their dramatic, structural, tonal, and thematic ironies.

When we come to the tales, the comic and ironic side of Poe is clearer and more emphatic. And it is here, rather than among the poems, I believe, that we find the great works of Poe. (All of Poe’s works, except his one novel, Arthur Gordon Pym, are “short.”) His criticism, though historically interesting in its specificity and topicality, and the best of his time (barring only Coleridge’s criticism), is valuable today mainly for its precise enunciation of principles of rational control over even the wildest materials—for its enunciation of a principle, not merely of “unity,” but of “totality of effect.” “If [the] very first sentence,” Poe wrote in his 1847 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, “tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then in his very first step has [the artist] committed a blunder. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the pre-established design” (my italics). This principle he observed in each and every one of his tales—and not only in the well-known Gothic tales and detective stories, but also in the underrated comic and satiric tales, even though in these he was “slapping” (as he said in a letter to Joseph Snodgrass in 1841) “left & right at things in general.”

In Poe’s characteristically intricate, even involuted patterns of dramatic irony, the apparent narrative “voice” which pervades the surface atmosphere of the work is also seen within a qualifying frame. Several of the tales (for example, “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Ligeia,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Cask of Amontillado”) involve a confessional element, wherein a first-person narrator, like Montresor, seems calmly or gleefully to recount horrible deeds, but which generally implies a listener to whom the agonized soul is revealing his torment. Especially revealing of the ironic structure thus achieved is Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado.” In the surface story, Montresor seems to be chuckling over his flawlessly executed revenge upon unfortunate “Fortunato” fifty years before. But a moment’s reflection suggests that the indistinct “you” whom Montresor addresses in the first paragraph is probably his death-bed confessor—for if Montresor has murdered Fortunato fifty years before, he must now be some seventy to eighty years of age. None of this is explicitly stated; it is presented dramatically; and we get the double effect of feeling the coldly calculated murder at the same time that we see the larger point that Montresor, rather than having successfully taken his revenge “with impunity,” as he says, has instead suffered a fifty-years’ ravage of conscience. Likewise, many of Poe’s Gothic tales seem to involve supernatural happenings; but insinuated into them, like clues in a detective story, are details which begin to construct dramatic frames around the narrative “voice” of the work. These dramatic frames suggest the delusiveness of the experience as the first-person narrator renders it. As in Henry James and Joseph Conrad, there is often in Poe a tale within a tale within a tale; and the meaning of the whole lies in the relationship of the various implied stories and their frames rather than in the explicit meaning given to the surface story by the dramatically involved narrator.

Only within the last ten to fifteen years have critics begun to examine Poe’s narrators as characters in the total design of his tales and poems, and to suspect that even his most famous Gothic works—like “Usher” and “Ligeia”—have ironic double and triple perspectives playing upon them: supernatural from one point of view, psychological from another point of view, and often burlesque from yet a third. Not only is nearly half of Poe’s fiction satiric and comic in an obvious way, but the Gothic tales contain within them satiric and comic elements thematically related to the macabre elements. Poe seems very carefully to have aimed at the ironic effect of touching his readers simultaneously on an archetypal irrational level of fear and on an (almost subliminal) level of intellectual and philosophical perception of the Absurd. The result in the Gothic tales, as in many of the poems, is a kind of ambivalent mockery. We can respond to Poe’s scenes of horror or despair at the same time that we are aware of their caricatural quality.

Although not really one of Poe’s complex tales and at the end ostensibly comic, “The Premature Burial” (1844) is probably the clearest example of Poe’s double effect, of his Gothic irony. The hero, an avid reader of Gothic books about burial alive, relates horrifying “factual” his tories for three-quarters of the tale. Terrified of being buried alive himself, especially since he is subject to cataleptic fits, the protagonist arranges for a special sepulchre, easily opened from within, and a special coffin, with a spring-lid and a hole through which a bell-pull is to be tied to the hand of his “corpse.” When he awakes in a cramped, dark, earthy-smelling place, he is convinced that he has fallen into a trance while among strangers and that he has been:

…thrust deep, deep, and for ever, into some solitary and nameless grave…this awful conviction forced itself, thus, into the innermost chambers of my soul…I once again struggled to cry aloud. And in this second endeavor I succeeded. A long, wild, and continuous shriek, or yell, of agony, resounded through the realms of the subterrene Night.

“Hillo! hillo, there!” said a gruff voice in reply.

The Gothic terror is comically undercut by the reply, and it turns out that the hero has fallen asleep in the narrow berth of a ship, where he has sought refuge for the night, and he is rousted out of his bunk by the sailors he has awakened with his horrible cry. Once we see that this is by no means a straightforward Gothic tale, we can see also the comic exaggeration of the overwrought Gothic style, that is, of what conventionally are “flaws” for twentieth-century readers. The emphasized “deep, deep, and for ever,” the italicized “grave,” the punning meaning of “innermost chambers of my soul,” the redundancy of “shriek, or yell,” and the capitalized letter of “subterrene Night” are typical of the exaggerations elsewhere in the tale. There can be no doubt that these stylistic exaggerations are part of Poe’s buŕlesque technique once we read the conclusion, for the incident just described strikes the narrator as so ludicrous that he is shocked into sanity:

My soul acquired tone—acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise…. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. “Buchan” I burned. I read no “Night Thoughts”—no fustian about churchyards—no bugaboo tales—such as this.

The hero then tells us that “from that memorable night” his “charnel apprehensions” were “dismissed forever;” and with them “vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which, perhaps, they had been less the consequence than the cause.”

The satiric irony of the tale is multiple. The narrator horrifies us with his chilling “factual” cases in the first three-quarters of the tale; and then he loses his charnel apprehensions quite suddenly, whereas we are still left entertaining the ghastly possibilities he has suggested. Moreover, the earnestness of his conversion suggests parody of didactic magazine fiction (“out of Evil proceeded Good…. very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion”), especially when we remember Poe’s formulation of the “Heresy of the Didactic” in “The Poetic Principle” and elsewhere. Finally, in the last paragraph, just as we are perhaps adjusting to the comic conclusion, the narrator reaffirms (“Alas!”) that “sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful.” The “imagination of man” cannot “explore with impunity its every cavern”; our “Demons” must be allowed to “sleep, or they will devour us.” Thus, the final lines suggest with nice ambiguity both the psychological and the supernatural, and leave us entertaining the serious possibilities of the absurd situation.

Many critics, however, will grant Poe a unified com plexity of symbolism supporting the madness of an obviously mad character, like Roderick Usher, but balk at seeing an ironic complexity governing the whole tale in the suggested madness of the narrators of spooky stories like “Usher” and “Ligeia.” Edward Wagenknecht, for example, has written that the “absurd notion” that “Ligeia” is “not a story of the supernatural but a study in morbid psychology” requires that we “ignore the text except where it can be perverted” and that we substitute “the fashionable notions of a later period” for those of Poe’s own time. “Neither aesthetically nor psychologically,” Wagenknecht continues, does this twentieth-century Freudian reading allow us to read the tale as a nineteenth-century story:

Abnormal as he is, the narrator is a fairly conventional type of Poe hero; if we are to assume that we see the whole story in a distorted mind in this instance, why should not the other stories be interpreted on the same basis? Indeed, once we have decided to ignore the author’s intentions and the milieu out of which the story comes, there is no reason why we should confine ourselves to misrepresenting Poe; an unlimited field is opened up.

Wagenknecht’s theoretical point is well taken, but his conclusion about Poe is in error for, given the psychological theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the techniques of nineteenth-century Romantic fiction, especially in Germany and America, one is forced to conclude that the psychological reading of “Ligeia” is, for the proper audience, indeed a nineteenth-century reading. As Michael Allen has demonstrated in his Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, the concept of a coterie audience was an important element in the attitude of the writers of fiction for the influential Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, whose lead Poe seems to have followed, even though he also subjected that journal to satiric bur lesque. There was, in the minds of these writers, on the one hand, a large mass audience addicted to the somewhat tawdry melodramas of people caught in impossible predicaments, such as being accidentally baked in an oven (or buried alive), and, on the other hand, a smaller coterie of more perceptive readers who could enjoy the sly satire insinuated into such tales.

On the surface, of course, “Ligeia” is a serious supernatural tale of metempsychosis. But it can also be read as the story of the ambiguous delusions of a guilt-ridden madman who has probably murdered his wife (perhaps two wives) and hallucinated a weird rationalization of his crimes in the “ghostly” return of his first wife. Moreover, the absurdist element in the tale is underscored in the opening paragraphs, wherein the narrator tells us that not only can he not remember where or how he met Ligeia, he cannot even remember her last name! The full name of his “second” wife, the Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine, he remembers with constrasting specificness, since her title is what prompts him to marry her in the first place. This contrast with the partially nameless Ligeia underscores her unreal quality and leads us back to the absurd situation described in the opening paragraphs, only now it is clear that the narrator has tried to put something over on us—or on himself. The facts that the narrator is a drug addict and that several of his descriptions of Ligeia are in terms of comparison with “opium-dreams,” that he has prepared for Rowena not a bridal chamber but a funeral chamber, that he is aware of what he calls his own “incipient madness,” and finally that Poe has very clearly provided us with the narrator’s motive for murdering Rowena, should be enough evidence for anyone as to what were Poe’s intentions in this “Gothic” tale.

Pursuing the matter of Poe’s “intentions” further, we should note that the first several paragraphs of “Ligeia” are burlesqued almost phrase by phrase in the opening paragraphs of “The Man That Was Used Up. A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign” published in 1839, a year after “Ligeia.” This comic tale presents a completely artificial man, Brevet Brigadier General A. B. C. Smith, severely (almost totally) wounded in the “Indian” Wars, but fully reconstructed by American technological know-how: he is fitted up with artificial limbs, artificial shoulders, an artificial chest, and artificial hair, eyes, teeth, and palate. When put all together, the General is a handsome figure of a man, over six feet tall, and altogether admirable. Of him, however, the narrator remarks that his appearance “gives force to the pregnant observation of Francis Bacon that ‘there is no exquisite beauty existing in the world without a certain degree of strangeness in the expression’.” This, of course, is just what the narrator of “Ligeia,” also alluding to Francis Bacon, says of her beautifully strange face. The implications for Poe’s detached, ironic attitude toward “Ligeia” are obvious; but Poe has also recorded his attitude in an ironic letter to P. P. Cooke the same year “The Man That Was Used Up” was published. Regarding “Ligeia” he told Cooke who, he professed to believe, understood “Ligeia” better than others (a doubtful matter): “As for the mob—let them talk on. I should be grieved if I thought they comprehended me here.”

The effect of “Ligeia” is then double—for the coterie of the perceptive. The rationale of the tale is psychological (and who can deny that Poe was interested in abnormal psychology?), but its primary impact is spooky and weird. Yet this double impact is but part of Poe’s irony, for the tale also contains under its primary structure of ghostly events, its secondary structure of psychological hallucination, its tertiary structure of absurdity, yet a fourth structure of satire aimed at the Transcendentalists (for that is what Ligeia is, a Transcendental list) and at the two kinds of horror materials to be found in the German and English brands of Gothicism (as certain twisted parallels to Ivanhoe suggest).

As to Poe’s “intentions” in general, critics until recently have failed to consider with enough care several revealing documents in which Poe discusses his plans for a book-length series of burlesque tales, to be read at the monthly meeting of “The Folio Club.” These “Folio Club Tales” (never published as such) included the ostensibly serious tales “Metzengerstein,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Assignation,” “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Shadow,” “Silence,” and very probably “Ligeia.” The first seventeen tales Poe published include these eight stories, along with nine obviously comic ones, and seventeen is the number of burlesques Poe mentions in a letter to an editor on September 2, 1836:

At different times there has appeared in the Messenger a series of Tales, by myself—in all seventeen. They are of a bizarre and generally whimsical character…. I have prepared them for republication in book form, in the following manner. I imagine a company of 17 persons who call themselves the Folio Club….

The Folio Club, according to Poe’s “Introduction” (extant in manuscript) was a “Junto of Dunderheadism,” formed on April first, the “settled intention” of which was “to abolish Literature, subvert the Press, and overturn the Government of Nouns and Pronouns.” Among its seventeen members (the authors and narrators) were: Mr. Solomon Seadrift (apparently author of “MS. Found in A Bottle”), Mr. Horribile Dictu, with white eyelashes, who had graduated from Göttingen (apparently author of “Metzengerstein”), Mr. Blackwood Blackwood (apparently author of “Loss of Breath”). But even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that “Ligeia” is not a Folio Club tale, we still have a remarkable pattern: all of Poe’s tales up to “Ligeia” were Folio Club burlesques or else clearly comic and satiric.

Of the tales included in this volume, only a half-dozen are comic and satiric in any obvious way. “Loss of Breath” (1832), for example, is a burlesque of “sensationist” and “predicament” stories appearing in Blackwood’s, with side jabs at Transcendentalism (both German and American), though the tale is not without some grisly scenes of horror. The “predicament” of the narrator: he has lost his breath while cursing his wife. He tries to get along without the faculty of speech that his “loss” engenders by practicing the “Indian” dramas then popular on the American stage, for these plays require only “frog-like” tones, looking asquint, showing of teeth, working of knees, shuffling of feet, and other “unmentionable graces which are justly considered the characteristics of a popular performer.” While searching for his breath, the hero is beaten, accused of various crimes, hanged, partially dissected, and entombed—all the while conscious of his “sensations.” A refinement of this satire on the Blackwood’s tale appears six years later in the companion stories “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament” (1838), the title of the second being a kind of comment on the first. In “Blackwood Article,” the litterateur Mr. Blackwood Blackwood, editor of an influential British journal, advises a Bluestocking litterateur on the publishing situation of the day; and his recommendations constitute Poe’s burlesque assessment of the Blackwood’s formulae, with comments on the “tone didactic,” the “tone enthusiastic,” the “tone natural,” the “tone laconic,” the “tone metaphysical,” and the “tone elevated, diffusive, and interjectional,” in the latter of which the “words must be all in a whirl, like a humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which answers remarkably well instead of meaning…the best of all possible styles where the writer is in too great a hurry to think.” Blackwood gives the young lady (whose name is either Suky Snobbs or Psyche Zenobia, depending on the precision of one’s pronunciation) several “piquant facts for similes” and “piquant expressions” which she is to introduce into her narrative. The companion tale is Miss Snobbs’s (or Zenobia’s) attempt to write in the Blackwood’s style, replete with badly garbled versions of Blackwood’s expressions. Suky (or Psyche) tells of her “sensations” when her head gets caught in a steeple clock: the clock hand comes down upon her neck while she is looking out of a hole in the clock-face; while she is inextricably caught in this predicament, her head is severed from her body—a circumstance which gives rise to profound thoughts on the nature of “identity.”

In “Some Passages from the Life of a Lion” (“Lionizing,” 1835), Poe, with indecent sexual innuendo, lampoons the “literati” of America and Great Britain, in particular, the British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the British patroness of the arts Lady Blessington, along with Thomas Moore (the Irish poet), Francis Jeffrey (the Scots editor of the Edinburgh Review), and Nathaniel P. Willis (an American editor). The narrator of the tale, having completed a treatise on “Nosology” is lionized by arty society, and at one point demands of an artist 1,000 pounds for the privilege of portraying his nose on canvas. Later, having been insulted by the men in the group, the hero shoots off the “nose” of a rival in a duel, a circumstance which makes his rival the new lion of the day, pursued ardently by the literary ladies. The thinly disquised motifs of impotence and perversion need little comment as satiric blasts at the litterateurs of his day.

In “Never Bet the Devil Your Head, A Tale with a Moral” (1841), Poe “answers” the charge that his works are unmoral. Only the “moral” of this tale is a satiric slap at the high moralizing of the Transcendentalists and at their journal, the Dial. The shocking conclusion of the tale, wherein the narrator coldly plans to have the body of his friend Toby Dammit dug up for “dog’s meat,” has been pointed to by some critics as an example of the fierceness and basic uncongeniality of “humor” in Poe. But the tale takes on a different complexion when we see the clues to Dammit’s true identity, first blatantly announced in the subtitle and then continued, detective-story-like, in his peculiar mannerisms: even as a youngster he wears moustaches, has a peculiar “style” of enunciation, and is constantly wiggling, leaping, running. The “moral” of the sad tale of Dammit, who prides himself on his nearly transcendental ability to “leap” to great heights, becomes absurdly clear when we see that a “moral tale” is for Poe (who detested works in which a moral overrides the artistry) an animal fable in the manner of Aesop and La Fontaine: the comic burlesque of the “dissolute” life of the “immoral” but transcendentally gifted Dammit which culminates in such profound “tragedy” for him becomes even more comically pointed when we see that it is merely the story of a boy and his dog.

“Some Words with a Mummy” (1845) comically presents Poe’s dissatisfaction with mobocracy, with the already burgeoning American technology, and with the very concept of “Progress” which had become by 1845 dear to the hearts of his countrymen. An Egyptian nobleman, Count Allamistakeo, is resurrected by means of the Voltaic pile in nineteenth-century America and confronted with modern invention, science, government, and culture. But as the modern nineteenth-century gentlemen who have revived him question him about Egyptian life, they find themselves rather hard put to find areas in which their own culture is superior; increasingly they ignore the implications of Allamistakeo’s words, preferring to think him a bit addled. They question him on phrenology, mesmerism, architecture, transportation, mechanics, steam power, metaphysics (from the Dial, a “chapter or two about something that is not very clear, but which the Bostonians call the Great Movement of Progress”), and democracy (some Egyptian provinces had tried it but consolidated into “the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the earth”—the tyrant Mob). Finally, having failed on every count to demonstrate the superiority of nineteenth-century life, even in dress, the Americans confront Allamistakeo with “Ponnonner’s lozenges” and “Brandeth’s pills.” At this, the defeated Egyptian blushes and hangs down his head. The narrator, however, unlike his friends, is more deeply disturbed by the experience, and comments at the end: “The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything is going wrong.”

These tales are not so often anthologized as the Gothic tales, but they are representative of nearly half of Poe’s fiction. Of the more sinister seeming tales included in this volume, “Metzengerstein” (1832) is a good example of a work Poe intended as a satiric parody of the supernatural horror tale, but which became his first Gothic hoax when his readers took the tale seriously. Its extended series of plot ironies, its caricatured fifteen-year-old Gothic villain, its “dunderheaded” Gothic narrator (who at one point praises death by consumption), and its melodramatic style all interweave to form a clear satiric pattern that mocks the few scenes of effective horror that Poe intrudes, as it were, into the satire. Moreover, the working out of an ominous prophecy is comically parodied by a confused curse, which also works out, ironically, in every detail, so that the plot as a whole becomes a kind of cosmic hoax, augmented by man’s perverse propensity to act against his own best interests. The series of plot ironies culminates in the climax of the Gothic plot as the fiendish boy-villain rides to a fiery death at the very moment of his apparent triumph over what he considers his deadly enemy—a horse!

Poe’s second “Gothic” tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833), on the surface a supernatural adventure story, not only parodies its literary type through blatant absurdities (such as the narrator’s dabbing desultorily at a sail with a tar-brush only to discover that he has spelled out destruction and discovery) but also through an ironic distance between narrator and reader that mocks the narrator’s supercilious conception of his unshakable rationality. At the beginning of the tale, the narrator, in a crisp and fact-filled style, insists on his unemotional and rational character. On a simple “Gothic” level, this emphasis seems to confirm the reality of the supernatural events to follow. But Poe immediately subjects his narrator to a terrifying storm; and in contrast to the stoicism of an old sailor whom he contemptuously calls “superstitious,” the narrator himself becomes increasingly frenzied, and his style of narration highly cadenced and emotional. The machinations of fortune ironically preserve him from death at the very moment of apparent destruction by throwing him high into the air and into the rigging of a gigantic phantom ship, which we subsequently learn has been growing in the South Seas water like a living thing. The rest of the tale, in which the phantom ship with its silent statue-like crew sails into an opening at the pole and goes “down,” is rendered with an atmosphere of dreaminess that, combined with the narrator’s proven untrustworthiness, suggests that the incredible events are the delusion of a man driven mad. Seen as a voyage of “discovery,” the ludicrous “supernatural” events act as a grotesquerie of the discovery of what lies beyond the normal world or beyond death, for the tale abruptly ends at the very verge of revelation in apparent final destruction and silence. Just as Arthur Gordon Pym journeys toward the great discovery of what lies “Beyond” only to find the white blankness of Nothingness, so the caricatured narrator of “MS. Found in a Bottle” discovers Nothing.

In “The Assignation” (1834), it is the perverse fortune of the laughing and crying Byronic stranger to become united with his beloved only in death. The tale has seemed to most critics one of Poe’s most intensely “Romantic” productions. But under its Romantic surface is presented a coded satiric allegory of burlesque parallels and contrasts to Lord Byron’s intrigue with the Countess Guiccioli, to Thomas Moore’s adulatory account of his visit to Byron’s Venice apartment in 1819, and to Moore’s edition of Byron’s letters in 1830. The cream of the jest and salient clue to the satiric hoax lies in an outrageous pun: “To die laughing,” the mysterious Byronic stranger remarks to the narrator, “must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths! Sir Thomas More—a very fine man was Sir Thomas More—Sir Thomas More died laughing, you remember.” The thrice-repeated name of the decapitated Sir Thomas More has no other function in the tale than to act as a pun on the name of the Romantic poet Tom Moore (whom Poe here subjects to satiric decapitation).

The fusion of the satiric and the sinister in the tale (characterized indirectly by the narrator himself as a “mingled tone of levity and solemnity,” along with an excess of exclamation points, “ineffables,” tear-stained pages, and submerged satiric puns) is imaged several times in the story: in the altar to laughter (the only monument to have survived in ancient Sparta); in the grinning masks at Persepolis (out of the eyes of which, however, adders writhe); in the comic incongruity of the furnishings of the Byronic stranger’s apartment (with its gigantic paint ings and fragile glassware); and in the fiery “arabesque” censers lighting his apartment. Like the censers’ flames, his spirit, the Byronic stranger says, is “writhing in fire,” a phrase which not only suggests his torment but also picks up the image of the writhing adders in the grinning masks at Persepolis. The tale is both a Romantic tale of dark passion and a burlesque. The imagery of dreams and the delirium of a spirit writhing in fire, combined with the satiric allegory, the altar to laughter, the melodramatic death, the death-jest and pun, and the writhing adders and grinning masks all together make “The Assignation” itself an emblem of the serio-comic, ironic ambivalence of Poe’s “Gothic” fiction.

In “Berenice” (1835), another “serious” tale of compulsion which actually lampoons its literary type, it is the absurd obsession of the narrator with Berenice’s teeth which leads to his grief, an obsession resulting from a temper of mind engendered by his grotesque birth and rearing. It has been his perverse misfortune to have been both born and brought up in his mother’s library, and thus he has become totally imbued with the Gothic horrors and weird philosophical (Transcendental) mysticism of the day. “Shadow” (1835) and “Silence” (1837), under their seemingly mystic and intensely “poetic” surfaces, seem in substance and style to be parodies of pseudo-poetic transcendental fictions, especially those of Bulwer-Lytton, De Quincey, and the other “psychological autobiographists” (perhaps including Emerson) indicated in Poe’s subtitle to “Silence.” “Shadow,” after developing a sense of the finality of death concludes with an ironic turn in which the chilling immortality of the “shadows” of the narrator’s friends is revealed to him though, since he and his companions are dead drunk, it is hard to tell how truly revealing the transcendental “sleep-waking” revelation is. “Silence” develops the theme of a deceptive and illusory world, with shrieking water-lilies, lowing hippopotami, and graven rocks whose letters change. At the end, a Demon laughs hysterically at a confused human being, while a lynx stares steadily at the Demon’s face. That the lynx is a symbol of the ironic vision peering unflinchingly into the face of perversity is suggested by Poe’s lynx metaphor in Marginalia (a series of brief “filler” notes Poe printed in journals he edited in the 1840s), though the meaning of the lynx is only vaguely felt in the satiric “confusion” of the tale. Poe writes in Marginalia that “it is only the philosophical lynx-eye that, through the indignity-mist of Man’s life, can still discern the dignity of man.” These, then, are the “Gothic” tales, published in the Southern Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1837, that Poe apparently intended to include in the burlesque Folio Club series, tales that Poe considered of a “bizarre and generally whimsical character.”

Between 1838 and 1840, the middle years of his career, Poe published three of his most famous Gothic stories: “Ligeia,” which we have already discussed, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “William Wilson.” Like “Ligeia,” the other two tales involve “doubles” and dramatize a weird universe as perceived by a subjective mind. “Usher,” despite the supernatural atmosphere, can be read as the tale of the frenzied fantasies of both the narrator and Usher, fantasies engendered by a vague fear that something ominous may happen and by the disconnected, alien environment. The overriding theme is the mechanism of fear itself, which has perversely operated on Roderick Usher before the narrator arrives, and which operates on the narrator through Usher afterwards. When the narrator rides his horse up to the House of Usher and gazes at its leaden-eyed aspect and at the tarn, with its sickly white stems of dead plants sticking up through the stagnant water, he is immediately seized by a vague apprehension. Later in the tale, he remarks that the “mental disorder” and “hysteria” of his friend Roderick Usher “terrified” and “infected” him: “I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.” The narrator’s confrontation with (and submission to) a mind gone mad is imaged in the facelike appearance of the House itself, with its leaden-hued eyelike windows and its zigzag crack down the middle, and in the wild “arabesque” face of Roderick Usher. The poem “The Haunted Palace,” which Usher has composed, is also a symbolic, indeed allegorical, portrait of a facelike structure. The “face” of the palace changes when the “Monarch Thought” topples from his throne within, and the palace comes to resemble the face of Usher and his House as the narrator has described them. Moreover, when the narrator first looks down into the tarn, what he should see of course is his own face since he is on its very brink, but instead he sees the inverted image of the “face” of the House of Usher. His next action is to go inside and meet Usher face to face. Immediately, his attention is arrested by certain details of Usher’s face; though he does not articulate the resemblances, as such, the narrator so describes the weblike hair of Usher that we are compelled to remember the webwork of fungi about the eaves of the House.

By the time the narrator “sees” the “return” of Madeline Usher from her grave, the themes of narcissism and inversion are so clear that the relevance of the absurdist interlude, “The Mad Trist of Sir Lancelot Canning” to the story as a whole (that is, to the dramatic situation of the narrator rather than merely to Roderick’s “trist” with his twin sister) is obvious. The tale is the story of the “mad trist” of the twin, hysterical personalities of the narrator and Usher. Finally, we do not know for sure what has happened for, as our narrator flees “aghast” from the scene, the face of the House splits apart and sinks into that tarn which first merged the images of the faces of both the House and the narrator. The tale has long been hailed as a masterpiece of Gothic horror; it is also a masterpiece of dramatic irony and structural symbolism.

“William Wilson” (1839), though lacking the complexity of “Ligeia” and “Usher,” exhibits Poe’s continuing use not only of the double but also of double perspective. Although apparently a straight Romantic tale of a man’s confrontation, supernaturally, with his own soul, the tale can be read as the delusive but perversely persistent confrontation of a guilt-ridden mind with itself. Whether the second Wilson, twin of the narrator, exists as a supernatural spirit or as a construct of the mind of the narrator remains ambiguous, as in other Poe tales, though the clues for a double reading are carefully planted. Again, the world that we perceive as readers is what is filtered through the subjective mind of the narrator, and it is this structure, along with some absurdist motifs (such as the precise timing of the second Wilson’s entrances and his recurrent whisper), that gives rise to the dramatic irony of the tale. Certainly, if the second Wilson is the product of the imagination of the first Wilson, the first Wilson’s behavior must seem to his companions, if not comic, very peculiar indeed.

Poe’s “serious” tales, clearly, are only apparently serious in the manner that they purport to be. The whole of Poe’s Gothic fiction can be read not only as an ambivalent parody of the world of Gothic horror tales, but also as an extended grotesquerie of the human condition. Nothing quite works out for his heroes, even though they sometimes make superhuman efforts, and even though they are occasionally rescued from their predicaments. They undergo extended series of ironic reverses in fictional structures so ironically twisted that the form itself, even the very plot, approaches an absurd hoax perpetrated on the characters. The universe created in Poe’s fiction is one in which the human mind tries vainly to perceive order and meaning. The universe is deceptive; its basic mode seems almost to be a constant shifting of appearances; reality is a flux variously interpreted, or even created, by the individual human mind. In its deceptiveness, the universe of Poe’s Gothic fiction seems not so much malevolent as mocking or “perverse.” The universe is much like a gigantic hoax that God has played on man, an idea which is the major undercurrent of Poe’s essay on the universe, Eureka. Thus, the hoaxlike irony of Poe’s technique has its parallel in the dramatic world in which his characters move.

The ultimate irony of this universe, however, is the “perversity” of man’s own mind. The mind, and the mind only, seems to sustain Poe’s heroes in their most desperate predicaments; yet in an instant the mind is capable of slipping into confusion, hysteria, madness—even while it seems most rational. From a more “Gothicist” point of view, Edward H. Davidson, without using the term irony, and without reading Poe’s Gothic tales ironically or satirically, comes to much the same conclusion regarding Poe’s universe. “Poe’s nightmare universe,” Davidson writes, “is one in which…people…are condemned to live as if they are in some long aftertime of belief and morality.” The evil-doer is driven by “some maggot in the brain” that leaves him a kind of “moral freak” in a universe that also has some fantastic defect in it. In Poe’s universe, Davidson suggests, evil and suffering are “the capacity and measure of man to feel and to know”; pain is the basis of life, and death is the only release from his “grotesque condition of ‘perversity.’”

This view of Poe’s “perverse” universe is, I think, essentially correct. Poe’s fiction developed from a basically satiric mode into an ironic mode in which a tragic response to the perversities of fortune and to the treacheries of one’s own mind is contrasted by a near-comic perception of the absurdity of man’s condition in the universe. Such a double perception, according to the German Ironists, leads, through art, to a momentary transcendence of the dark chaos of the universe. If the artist (and through him the reader) can mock man’s absurd condition at the same time that he feels it deeply, he transcends earthly or finite limits in an artistic paralleling of God’s infinite perception. In Poe, however, such transcendence is always at the expense of the less perceptive mind. Poe plays a constant intellectual game with his readers; he tries to draw the reader into the “Gothic” world of the mind, but he is ready at any moment to mock the simplistic Gothic vision (under the trappings of which Poe saw man’s real estrangement and isolation) that contemporary readers insisted on in the popular magazines.

Of Poe’s remaining fiction, nearly half (nineteen short tales out of forty-two) are clearly comic; the twenty-three Gothic and “philosophical” works, along with the novel Pym, further extend the central theme of the subjective deceptiveness of the world in terms of Nothingness and the “perverse.” “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), on the surface a tale of a lonely city wanderer, who is weirdly suggestive of what Hawthorne called the Outcast of the Universe (in his own dark “comedy,” “Wakefeld”), may be read also as the deluded romanticizing of the tipsy narrator, who perversely attributes a Romantic significance to an old drunk who wanders from bistro to bistro. In “A Descent Into the Maelström” (1841), Poe emphasizes the traditional Western themes of transcendence from a petty involvement with “self” and the need for submission to the larger design of Nature. Giving up all sense of mere individual importance, the narrator feels a positive wish to see what lies at the bottom of the whirlpool. Although he survives (probably by mere accident rather than by his careful observation of and submission to Nature, since the mechanics of the hydraulic effect on geometric forms is false), his incomplete confrontation with Nothingness at the center of the whirlpool (a “manifestation of God’s power”) yet turns his hair prematurely white. Thus the tale ironically inverts traditional Western belief: the narrator’s mystical experience of the magnificence of God is one of horror rather than of beatitude.

“The Oval Portrait” (1842), a tale about the transfer of life from a living person to a painting, has a carefully constructed dramatic and ironic frame around it, so that the tale can also read as the dream of a man delirious from pain and lack of sleep. “The Masque of The Red Death” (1842), a tale of the supernatural visitation of Death himself, can also be read as a tone poem about hysteria, engendered by mood and setting, with a sarcastic concluding echo from Pope’s Dunciad. Prince Prospero’s sinister stronghold, of course, contrasts directly with the enchanted island of his namesake, Prospero, the magician in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The ironic theme of Poe’s tale focuses on the grimly perverse joke of Prospero’s having walled in death in a frenetic attempt to wall it out.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842) is one of Poe’s clearest dramatizations of the futile efforts of man’s will to survive the malevolent perversity of the world and to make order out of chaos. The tale has sometimes been read as the escape from madness through a descent into madness. Although the hero is mentally tortured until he confesses to himself that “all is madness” and that his mind has been “nearly annihilated,” he learns to rely on primal cunning, and an instinctive sense of danger. Under the razor-edge of the pendulum, he recovers his ratiocinative power: “for the first time during many hours—or perhaps days—I thought.” But the narrator thinks of his avoidance of the pit as: “the merest of accidents, and I knew that surprise, or entrapment into torment, formed an important portion of all the grotesquerie of these dun geon deaths.” Under the pendulum he becomes “frantically mad” and strains to force himself against the slowly descending blade. The irony, the grotesquerie of human dignity and rationality, here lies in the narrator’s ultimately futile efforts to change his basic condition. He cannot hurry destruction and thus avoid the torment allotted to him. His mind suffers another radical shock and, ironically, his mind hysterically shifts to an opposite mode, moving toward the rational only because of his helplessness in madness (which is a clear rationale for the insanity of Poe’s murders—to survive is man’s only duty). Then, escaping from the pendulum, he is, ironically, again faced with the pit. The walls become heated, and for “a wild moment” the narrator’s mind “refused to comprehend,” although at length he says “it burned itself in upon my shuddering reason.” Thinking of the cooling waters of the pit he rushes to its edge, only to stop short, again in horror of such a death. Then as the walls begin to close in, he realizes that he had been destined by his tormentors for the pit in the first place and that all his luck, all his cunning, and all his rgeained rationality have, ironically, trapped him into self-torment and increased his agony. The final irony comes with the sudden cessation of the movement of the walls, a rescue from outside that comes unexpectedly, independently, unconnected with his own personal fate at the last moment of his despair and defeat.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), a study in obsessive paranoia, is yet another story of the mind watching itself disintegrate under the stresses of delusion in an alienated world. It is the perverse fortune of the narrator to become fearful of the grotesque eye of a kindly old man, whom he says he loves. With a double perversity, he gives himself away to the police at the moment of success. Yet the narrator is caught in a weird world in which he loves the old man yet displays no real emotion toward him, in which he cannot let the “beloved” old man live and yet cannot kill him without remorse, in which he cannot expose his crime and yet must do so. Perhaps the final irony is that the apparent beating of his own heart which he mistakes as, first, the beating of the still-living heart of the old man, and which, second, seems to be an emblem of his own guilt (and which, finally, compels him to confess), may very well be initially the peculiar thumping sound of the wood-beetles gnawing at the walls. “The Black Cat” (1843) carries the same themes further and details more clearly the irrational desire, almost the ultimate irony, to act against oneself, with an ambiguous conclusion suggesting the agency of malevolent fortune at the same time that it suggests subconscious self-punishment. The major absurdist irony, perhaps, is that the murder which the narrator commits is the result of subconscious remorse over the cat he has previously mistreated. “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), ostensibly a story of metempsychosis, is more probably a murder story in which all the characters (and possibly the murderer) are duped regarding the reality of events. The physician, Templeton, obsessively (though perhaps unconsciously) reenacts the murder of his friend Oldeb years before and (unwittingly perhaps) takes another life. Moreover, the tale has a number of twisted parallels to Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntley (1799) which suggest a burlesque undercurrent to the hoaxlike “mystery” of the story.

“The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), seemingly more an essay than a tale, is a dark comedy of errors which clearly spells out Poe’s fundamental conception that it is man’s fate to act against his own best interests. But the dissertation on perversity has its dramatic irony, for the “rationality” of the narrator merely enmeshes him deeper in anxiety as he absurdly, helplessly, uses his imaginative intellect to will his own destruction by means of a mere whimsical thought. Having committed murder he reflects that he is “safe”—unless, of course, he be fool enough to confess. This foolish fancy immediately seizes him and he rushes out to confess his crime to passersby in the street. The recurrent confessional structure of other of Poe’s tales is an operative factor here too, for the narrator has apparently confessed to a priest in his cell the night before his impending execution. In an attempt to explain his obsession with the possibility that some “Imp” in the structure of the universe has victimized him, the narrator succeeds in convincing us not of his rationality but of his irrationality. The long prologue in its “circumlocution” does not directly make his point but instead seems to obscure the more direct and succinct conclusions. But the point of this circumlocutious inventiveness becomes clear when the narrator finally reveals to us his anxiety about his execution; his imagination immediately foresees additional possibilities for perverse speculation: in death he will be free of his physical chains and his cell—but what new torments yet await him, he wonders, in what afterlife?

“The Facts in The Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), purportedly a serious Gothic tale of the horror of prolonging life beyond the proper point of death, not only was a hoax in the sense of fraudulent literal fact (it was taken for a time to be an actual case history), but also contains absurd comic details suggestive of Poe’s intensely mocking attitude. For one thing, if we look closely at the details he gives us, we find that three-quarters of Valdemar’s lungs has turned to bone! And what is left is a mass of adhesions and holes. Despite this rather extreme condition (and he also has an aneurism), Valdemar is sitting up writing. His literary efforts suggest an ironic doubleness as the underlying vision of the tale, for he has been translating on the one hand an heroic drama of Schiller and on the other a mock-heroic burlesque from Rabelais. Valde mar’s very appearance suggests a symbolic doubleness—his black beard contrasts with his white hair: emblematic clues to the double-edged quality of the tale. Finally, after Valdemar’s “life” has been preserved by modern “technology” (in this case, mesmerism), the last horrible details suggest the real, grisly finality of Death.

Two other darker tales of the late’forties have similar “comic” undercurrents. “The Sphinx” (1846), comes quickly to a comic conclusion after a frightening and weird (but absurdly deceptive) vision of a monster that turns out to be a bug dangling only a fraction of an inch from the eye. “Hop-Frog” (1849) is a compellingly ludicrous tale of horrible revenge told almost sweetly in a fairy-tale style, at the conclusion of which the dwarf declares to the burning King and his ministers that their death is but his last “jest.”

Poe’s six ratiocinative tales of the 1840s represent the few successes of the acute mind in overcoming the bewildering deceptiveness of the perverse world. Five of the tales are ostensibly serious (“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “Marie Roget,” “The Purloined Letter,” “Goldbug,” “Descent into the Maelström”) and one is comic and suggests self-parody (“‘Thou Art the Man’”). The Dupin kind of mentality assumes a godlike omniscience, the “I” and the reader, the role of dull-witted dupes. The major ironies of these tales are consistent with Poe’s more clearly Gothic tales: their basis is the discrepancy between appearance and actuality; and the ease of Dupin’s solutions contrasts with our mystification.

The same concern with illusion, transitoriness, and death, and with absurd purpose and purposelessness, is to be found in the remainder of Poe’s fiction. The four poetic “landscapes” (not included here), “Island of the Fay” (1844), “Landscape Garden” (1842), “Amheim” (1847), and “Landor’s Cottage” (1849), supposedly deal with the natural beauty God has created in the world but insinuate the melancholy facts of death, imperfection, purposelessness in contrast to man’s futile imagining of an ideal state of harmony and beauty. Four philosophical dialogs, with and among bodiless spirits, including “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841), follow the same pattern of asserting some mystical meaning inherent in existence while quietly undercutting the assertion. “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” like others of the “serious” tales, has the pattern of a detective story. Seemingly a “loving” and affirmative dialog between two disembodied Platonic “spirits” beyond death, this dialog, we are gradually compelled to see, takes place in the grave. The major subjects of the tale, time, consciousness, and corporeality, come together in a chilly ironic revelation of what is Beyond: the merging of the body with the elements in the slow process of decay, while the spirit is, all the while, aware of this decay as its own energy fades away to a mere “glow” and silence—a chilling conception of afterlife indeed.

Poe’s concept of the “perverse” functioning as both a world view and a psychology is perhaps the ultimate grotesquerie to be found in his Gothic fiction. Poe’s characters live in a cosmos in which there are few certainties beyond that of individual annihilation. In a deceptive universe that does not provide for individual immortality, Poe’s heroes and heroines vainly struggle to find order and to preserve their lives. Yet they are at the same time fascinated with death as the ultimate fact of existence, and they perversely yearn for knowledge of the secret that lies beyond death. But in Poe’s universe, there is nothing beyond death, nothing beyond this “life.”

In a sense, the true horror, the true Gothic quality, of Poe’s tales lies in their substantive irony, for Poe’s tales are more than ironic in mode, more than supercilious hoaxes perpetrated on the unsuspecting devotees of the Gothic romance, though such mockery certainly looms large. The insinuated burlesque, the ironic modes of language, and the ironic themes merge with ironies of plot and characterization in the creation of an absurd universe.

Poe’s career is the history of his simultaneous exploration of the fearful and the ridiculous. This is not to deny the obsessive quality of his principal concerns. But his obsessive subjects and themes—the primal fact of death, the perverse fascination of death, the appalling possibility of complete annihilation into an ultimate Nothingness, the perverse mockery of fate, the horror of the inhuman and the dehumanized—and even the symbolization of subconscious feelings and the dramatization of a mind watching itself go to pieces—are indeed all done up, as more than one critic has suggested, in purple rhetoric, with ludicrous stage-Gothic decor, and with absurd interludes—but for a purpose.

In an attempt to suggest the depth and complexity of that purpose, the present anthology includes works which represent the range of Poe’s imagination, from the best of his comic and satiric works to the best of his Gothic works. Unfortunately a few (though very few) of the famous Gothic tales have been excluded in preference for some of the much underrated satiric pieces. But the fundamental ironic and skeptical consistency informing the seemingly diverse performance collected here is a remarkable literary achievement—perhaps one of the most remarkable of the nineteenth century.

Washington State University

October, 1969